How To Advertise My Business

How to advertise my business is a common question I get asked all the time from tradespeople looking into starting up a business of their own. Working as an employee is entirely different from being self-employed. How you get the word out about what you do will make all the difference in the world to how successful you will or will not be. In the initial stages of starting any business, the way you advertise is a critical juncture where you do not want to make any obvious mistakes.

How To Advertise My Business

With the startup phase of any business, you need to look at the aspect that you are a faceless entity that nobody knows of your existence. Once you have taken all the appropriate steps to having your business in place ready to start making some money, It’s now time to face the fact to get out there to compete. Depending on just what the business is all about, you’ll be providing a product, service or both. Your company will be dealing with offline, online or both avenues here as well. In today’s economy, most people are looking to be only online but are still using offline advantages, but most are operating both sectors as I’m presently doing with my business, TD Remodeling. In the past, it was just offline until I just recently expanded to incorporate an online presence. For our example, we will look at dealing with both.

When I looked at how to advertise my business to get the best for my dollar value, these are some worth considering.

Business Cards
Online ListingsYellow PagesWebsiteTV AdsRadioAds

When it comes to Marketing your business, there are a lot of areas where you can do things for free right up to the point of paying out large sums of money. One of the key issues I’ve always considered is, what’s the payback for the amount of cash paid out. So let’s start by taking a small look at the above list.

Business Cards

By far one of the cheapest methods of marketing your business is handing out business cards. You can have business cards at different outlets where your product or services would be noticed by others. Whenever you meet with people, groups functions, etc. you would be able to hand out your cards for more exposure for your business. The more people in your local area that start to know who you are and what you’re business is all about the better the exposure and referral rate will improve.

Online Listings

Another great way to get quality exposure to your business is through social media, free online bulletin boards where you’ll be able to advertise and post articles on what you do as well. There are a lot of people who will use Facebook to build a small online presence for business. Linkedin is a professional social media site where you can enter information about your company and what it is all about. Some business owners will have Google Plus, Twitter, Pinterest and the list goes on. Depending on what your products and services are, there are many places to fit the image to a marketing advantage to match up with your needs. There are the phone and business directories that may also be of some interest to market your business for exposure.

Yellow Pages

The yellow pages are an older form of marketing business which a lot of local companies will do in the areas they serve. With the passing of every year, I would think companies are moving from the phone books to the online listings, and ad campaigns were more people are looking up to find the services and products they want.

Website

Having a website registers much better with most people as the Internet keeps progressing more each year. Having all your goods and services quickly brought up on a cell phone or tablet is becoming increasingly more popular than any other means for people to find and get what they want.

TV Ads

Can be done but not practical for most companies and the smaller stations that will do a commercial for cheaper rates do not have the following to make it worth the cost for most businesses.

Radio

Radio ads are far cheaper than TV, but most companies can still do far better putting their money else were for advertisement.

Ads

Any ads you place in magazines, newspapers, printed out monthly community newsletters or individual flyers are all going to fluctuate in price depending on the area your canvassing, a total number of copies and who you’re dealing with. The bigger the article, number of prints, type of publication the more it can cost you. There are many ways to tap into these types of ads with just as many variables to how successful these ads will work for you.

8 Comments:

I once owned a collision repair shop before becoming a full time affiliate marketer. I found my best source of advertising to be word of mouth. The second was my website. Knowing how to rank in the search engines was key. I would always ask my customers how they heard of me. Most of the time it was from a satisfied customer or the 2nd most popular being a internet search.

Hi Jason and what you have commented about is the same way I find with my business as well. Most of my renovations is by word of mouth and referals. The thing is it takes six to twelve months to start getting yourself recognised to start getting the referrals you’ll require to make your money.

I do the business cards and paid for the yellow pages for one year and had my website from the beginning. With the website, I’m now also doing the social media. There are lots of ways one can advertise but most of them I prefer not to spend the money on and I stick with what works without all the extra costs.

For me, it’s simply business cards, hard copy portfolio and my website for online presence tied in with social media. (One year yellow pages to get started at the beginning.)

Some really cool ideas on how to adviertise your business here, I was particularly interested in the online listing option. I have a website and I wanted to know if it was safe to leave a link on these listing sites – will the backlink cause my website any penalty? Will Google see it as gaming the system?

One of the biggest things with Google is everything is compared to relevance. For instance, my website TD Remodeling is mainly about renovations. Google will not penalize it for any links and backlinks to marketing business, related renovation sites for materials, workmanship related sites with other contractors, etc.

Google will compare it to other sites like mine in the industry for relevance. If I were having all kinds of links for baby toys, Google would be able to process this as no proper connection and take the appropriate action.

I came from a well established company going back 5 generations and we never advertised as all our business came through our well established presence, word of mouth, respect and trust.

Since those day however I have started my own online affiliate marketing business. All businesses are the same: In order to flourish, trust and respect has to be gained from visitors yet this does take time to achieve on the web.

My current business demands a visual presence. I find Pinterest and Instagram super platforms for showing my associated products, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ close behind but I always share links to my articles on all these Social Media platforms in order to create a presence.

Google+ is imperative to me and not to be side-stepped. My ambition is to accomplish high website rankings in the future through the search engines, befriending Google wonâ€™t do you any harm.

The best bit is, they are all free to create a presence on the web. Sharing links regularly is a great form of advertising to accomplish trust with visitors so every time I create a post I share a link on these platforms.

Do you share your links regularly for advertising on these Social Media platforms?
Simon.

Thank you very much for this post.
It helped me a lot to get ideas what to do next. I have been doing SEO but not really advertising my site anywhere , my audience is getting bigger and bigger day by day but I think it is time to do some more serious stuff to make it even bigger.

Advertising can take many forms, and it is always best to look into many methods that could work for your business. Once you have recognized the different ways, then you can choose what works best for you moving forward.

One shoe does not fit all and depending on the advertising some methods make more sense to do than others when you consider the return on the money paid for what you get.

Just as each business can be unique, choosing the right ways to advertise will save you money while maximizing returns for what you do pay for in receiving business.